The Crown

[1] The term can be used to refer to the rule of law; or to the functions of executive (the Crown-in-council), legislative (the Crown-in-parliament), and judicial (the Crown on the bench) governance and the civil service.

It spread through English and later British colonisation and developed into an imperial crown, which rooted it in the legal lexicon of all 15 Commonwealth realms, their various dependencies, and states in free association with them.

[6] Warren J. Newman described the Crown is "a useful and convenient means of conveying, in a word, the compendious formal, executive and administrative powers and apparatus attendant upon the modern constitutional and monarchical state.

"[7] Lord Simon of Glaisdale stated:[8] The crown as an object is a piece of jewelled headgear under guard at the Tower of London.

The term "the Crown" is therefore used in constitutional law to denote the collection of such of those powers as remain extant (the royal prerogative), together with such other powers as have been expressly conferred by statute on "the Crown".Lord Diplock suggested the Crown means "the government [and] all of the ministers and parliamentary secretaries under whose direction the administrative work of the government is carried out by the civil servants employed in the various government departments.

[10] In William Blackstone's 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England, he explained that "the meaning therefore of the legislature, when it uses these terms of empire and imperial, and applies them to the realm and crown of England, is only to assert that our king is equally sovereign and independent within these his dominions, as any emperor is in his empire; and owes no kind of subjection to any other potentate on earth.

[14] The term the Crown then developed into a means by which to differentiate the monarch's official functions from his personal choices and actions.

[17] The Crown and the sovereign are "conceptually divisible but legally indivisible [...] The office cannot exist without the office-holder".

[25][37] (In countries using systems of government derived from Roman civil law, the state is the equivalent concept.

The Crown also represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, and judicial governance.

[46][47] Frederic William Maitland argued the Crown is a corporation aggregate embracing the government and the "whole political community".

Allen preferred to view the Crown as a corporation sole; one office occupied by a single person, enduring "through generations of incumbents and, historically, lends coherence to a network of other institutions of a similar nature.

"[49] Canadian academic Philippe Lagassé found the crown "acts in various capacities, as such: crown-in-council (executive); crown-in-parliament (legislative); crown-in-court (judicial).

Today, it is considered separate in every country, province, state, or territory, regardless of its degree of independence, that has the shared monarch as part of the respective country's government; though, limitations on the power of the monarch in right of each territory vary according to relevant laws, thus making the difference between full sovereignty, semi-sovereignty, dependency, etc.

[72] In criminal proceedings, the state is the prosecuting party; the case is usually designated (in case citation) as R v [defendant],[73] where R can stand for either rex (if the current monarch is male) or regina (if the monarch is female), and the v stands for versus.

Until the end of the 20th century, such case titles used the pattern R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, ex parte Miller.

In Scotland, criminal prosecutions are undertaken by the lord advocate (or the relevant procurator fiscal) in the name of the Crown.

The Crown can also be a plaintiff or defendant in civil actions to which the government of the Commonwealth realm in question is a party.

"[g][75] Due to the Irish War of Independence, "the phrase 'Crown Forces' came to represent something abhorrent in the Republican narrative".

[83] In addition, use of images of the crowns for commercial purposes is specifically restricted in the UK (and in countries which are party to the Paris Convention) under sections 4 and 99 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, and their use is governed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.

[84][85][86] It is also an offence under Section 12 of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 to give a false indication that any goods or services are supplied to the monarch or any member of the royal family.